Remember when science fairs were all about simulated volcanoes and locker alarms? Amateur stuff. These kids, both fresh out of sixth grade, are sitting at a lunch table and talking about tensile strength and hyperbolic paraboloids and, you know, saving lives in Haiti.

Lori Kurtzman, The Columbus Dispatch

Remember when science fairs were all about simulated volcanoes and locker alarms? Amateur stuff.

These kids, both fresh out of sixth grade, are sitting at a lunch table and talking about tensile strength and hyperbolic paraboloids and, you know, saving lives in Haiti.

“It was a really innovative project,” said 12-year-old Ashton Cofer. “And you might see it in the future.”

He’s speaking of the invention that’s been racking up the accolades for him and his 12-year-old partners, Julia Bray and Luke Clay. The Gahanna students just returned home from a second-place finish at a competition in Pamplona, Spain, and next week they head to Orlando, Fla. And then Washington, D.C.

Ashton and Luke made it to this interview, but Julia, fresh off the plane — her first flight, poor kid, was an international one — wasn’t feeling so great. So the boys, both of them sons of engineers, will explain what this thing is all about, and why there’s a can of Pringles chips on the table.

It started with a competition, the U.S. Army-sponsored eCYBERMISSION, which challenges students in sixth through ninth grades to tackle real-world problems using science, technology, engineering and math. The Gahanna team decided to take on earthquakes, having befriended some students in Haiti just before the catastrophic 2010 quake there.

“We investigated more and figured out that earthquakes were a global problem, and we could help solve them,” Luke said.

Or at least they could help create structures that wouldn’t crumble so easily in an earthquake. They started designing: a pyramid, a sphere. And then they hit on the hyperbolic paraboloid, a surface shaped, well, like a Pringles chip. They imagined a hut that looked like a power-plant cooling tower.

They thought about material, too. They knew they needed something cheap and local, because while earthquake-resistant structures already exist, they’re often costly to build. “Bamboo,” Ashton said. “ Guadua angustifolia.” Stronger than reinforced concrete, locally grown, the perfect building material.

By the way, these are real, human kids. They play soccer. They can’t wait to hit the pool this summer. Ashton has a YouTube video of some of his best practical jokes, the peak of which is the leaf-blower-powered toilet-paper launcher that unloads two rolls onto some poor soul trapped in the bathroom.

Anyway, back to the design: They made a few mock hyperboloid huts, and then they poured some tiny concrete structures, replicating the kind of homes that collapsed in Haiti. They negotiated an hour inside a lab in Battelle, where a machine shook the daylights out of a concrete house with pillars, a concrete house with solid walls, and their quake-safe hyperboloid house. The concrete structures split and crumbled.

Theirs didn’t.

“We were all pretty happy,” Ashton said. “Pretty relieved.”

Through this all, they consulted professors and engineers and other projects. Ashton’s engineer mother, Haruna Cofer, served as their adviser, although she said the adults generally stay out of the way.

It’s the students’ project, one they hope to see standing some day. They entered it in three competitions, the remaining two of which could get them started: On top of individual scholarships, the Christopher Columbus Awards in Orlando offer a $25,000 grant to a winning team, and the eCYBERMISSION’s competition awards $5,000 grants to implement projects. Both competitions paid for the students’ trips, too, while the First Lego League Open European Championship in Spain was sponsored by local businesses and Mom and Dad.